"The challenger's ugly food has shown us that even hideous things can be sweet on the inside." [Begins to cry]
A common saying among chefs is that "you first eat with your eyes." Cooks who produce this food apparently expect everyone eating to be blind.
It could take several forms - maybe it's collapsed into an indistinct brown or grey glop in a bowl. It would be a misshapen mound that vaguely looks like a cake. Random tentacles and
eyes could be mixed in. If it's a cake, expect the decorations to be something out of the wildest imagination of a
Nightmare Fetishist (whether or not the cook is actually one). The appearance of the dish is no indication of it's taste, and the most common outcome of this trope is that the food is actually delicious. Those wary of the dish at first may even find it
Orgasmically Delicious when they screw up the courage to try it.
Keep in mind, of course, that this is completely distinct from a
Lethal Chef or a
Cordon Bleugh Chef - in fact, while food such as this is a frequent indicator of one of those two tropes, it's increasingly common to have overlap with
Impossibly Delicious Food (though most people will expect it to
Taste Like Feet). It can overlap with
Alien Lunch in appearances.
Can easily be
Truth in Television - even in culinary schools, presentation is taught distinct from flavor, and it's fairly common for students to be much better at the latter.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Tina from Ai Yori Aoshi - as Taeko discovered, Tina's inability to make anything looking good did not stop her from making food that actually tastes good.
- Ryo from Otomen can occasionally (usually with Asuka's help) produce food that tastes decent. However, it will invariably look terrible.
- Naru from Love Hina is known to produce food that looks awful but tastes good.
- Asuna's first cake from the first anime adaptation of Mahou Sensei Negima!. The second came out looking much better. Appropriate, as she's anExpy of the above.
- Akane of Ranma ½ combines this with Lethal Chef - she creates food that is both inedible and hideous to look at. The only exception is her curry, which is edible (if bland)... but still hideous to look at.
- Axis Powers Hetalia: England's food is mostly portrayed as an indeterminable black mess. Sometimes it even gets pixeled out to emphasize this.
Comic Books
- The Cook from the Sturmtruppen will often serve this. It was once exagerrated when the mess came alive as a Blob Monster in a parody of Frankenstein.
Film
- Starship Troopers (the movie) had a scene where the recruits are in the chow line, loading up their trays with what appear to be different colors of pudding. Emphasized by one of them holding a ladle full up at eye level and disgustedly pouring it out.
- In Accepted, Glen creates a recipe he calls "Wads" that look like a well, wad of melted chocolaty goo. The others recoil at first, but once they get brave enough to taste them they rave that it's the greatest thing they've ever eaten.
- The eyeball soup in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
- In the Star Trek parody Galaxy Quest, the Thermians attempt to replicate food from the actors' supposed home world. Doctor Lazarus' dish is a bowl of clear liquid filled with live beetles.
Literature
- Molly in Moon Over Soho whenever she tries to cook anything that isn't High Victorian, on one occasion producing what is described as rubbery vulcanised mass that looks like one of those novelty vomit mats sold in Joke Shops (it was supposed to be lightly poached eggs in hollandaise sauce).
- In one of the Myth Adventures stories, Skeeve, having never seen spaghetti, describes it as white worms or snakes covered with blood red sauce.
- Also from the series, Pervian food is described as being difficult to keep from crawling away from your plate. The rest is left up to the reader's imagination.
- In Galaxy of Fear, there is "a dish full of eight-legged insects covered in a pink sauce." The boy wrinkling his nose at it quickly finds it's delicious and goes Big Eater on it.
- In Artemis Fowl, a sandwich that Artemis tried to make is described as looking like an explosion on a plate.
Live-Action TV
- A popular classic Sesame Street skit has Ernie making a plate of mashed banana with ice cubes and gravy on it. Bert is disgusted by its mere appearance, but guess what Oscar thinks?
- Star Trek occasionally has food that is unappetizing to behold. The Klingon dish Gahkt comes to mind, though Klingons are Proud Warrior Race Guys and it may be meant as showing how tough they are that they eat things that look frightening to most sentients.
- Babylon 5 occasionally has food that is unappetizing to behold. The dish Spoo comes to mind.
- Johnny Bago: When Johnny temporarily joins a circus (not that he wanted to join, he was blackmailed into it) the owner/ringmaster literally feeds the circus workers on garbage leftover from the previous day's crowds, all of which looks like scoops of brown blegh.
- In an episode of the classic paramedics drama Emergency!, the heroes save the life of a celebrity chef, who rewards them with an autographed copy of his latest book. When they later try to put together a dinner for the rest of the crew at their station using the book, they swiftly realize that they did something wrong and that dinner is ruined. They dump everything they were cooking into a single pot in order to hide the evidence. Just as they're taking it out back to dump it, the fire crew comes back and assumes dinner is ready. Despite having an odd gray color and the consistency of paper mache paste, the "stew" is universally deemed fantastically delicious by the other fire fighters, and the crew expects it to be made again in the future.
Music
- Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" has one verse about dealing with the intersection of this and the usual wares of a Lethal Chef: "I don't care what these people think I'm just sittin' here makin' myself nauseous with this ugly food that stinks!"
Newspaper Comics
- Frequently produced by Calvin's mom in Calvin And Hobbes.
- Foxtrot: Surprisingly, not Andy's cooking, though it frequently involves tofu. The cafeteria glop qualifies, however.
Real Life
- The traditional military dish of this sort is chipped beef on toast—better known to soldiers as "shit on a shingle."
- The Hawaiian islanders have a dish called "poi," which is made from the root of the taro plant. It is purple, and has the consistency (and taste!) of Elmer's glue.
- The classic "Chinese" dish (well... it was invented in San Francisco, California, by Chinese Americans, so its sort of Chinese) widely known as "Chow Mein" started as this: originally, it was a half-dozen different left-overs thrown together in a pot and served.
- "Nutraloaf" is an American prison food commonly served to inmates with serious discipline/behavior problems. It consists of several different foods (meat, bread/grain, apples, eggs, vegetables, beans, etc.) mixed together and baked into a meatloaf-like shape. Inmates eat it off a paper plate instead of a tray, without utensils. It is so universally reviled that inmates in several states have filed lawsuits to stop its use, arguing that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
- Quite a few students of the American public school system would argue that their cafeteria food falls under this trope. Not an impossibility in a school that serves meals such as mass produced beef and noodles, for instance.
- Casseroles of most any kind are a staple in large households. They're rarely pretty, but are usually the quickest and cheapest way to get everyone fed.
Theatre
- In Dream Girl, one Dream Sequence has a throwaway reference (in the context of fine dining) to "oysters Rockefeller, which Ford Madox Ford, who was a great epicure, describes as swimming in a kind of green scum."
Webcomics
- Schlock Mercenary has a restaurant chain that serves 'smutto
', a combination of corn smut (basically mold), and natto (fermented soybeans). It's so vile that even Schlock (who'll eat pretty much anything) hesitates before eating it.
Schlock: "And you just automatically give it to people who say '
number two'."
Western Animation
